Mad Max Review: The Single Best Thing About the Movie Is...

In Mad Max: Fury Road, Charlize Theron plays Imperator Furiosa, a desert angel of death with a shaved head and a gift for operating big trucks and a prosthetic left arm, and in a way, everything you need to know about George Miller’s long-delayed Mad Max sequel can be gleaned from this arm. It is gorgeous, in its grand metallic ugliness—a claw, really, but delightful to look at, and to watch in action. How did Furiosa lose her arm? Who knows! In a more traditional modern summer blockbuster, or something by Marvel, where every character’s every impulse is carefully explained and duly mythologized, the arm would probably have an origin story; there might be an entire scene where Furiosa regards it sadly while relating how every motivation for every action she’s undertaken since relates to this missing arm. I lost it in a blimp accident that also took my mother, and that’s why I’ve hated blimps ever since...

But nah—no arm, no explanation, no problem. And this is the glory of the newest Mad Max: it just...is. Technicolor orange, like rancid macaroni and cheese, full of delightfully detailed war rigs and war boys, explosions splashing ecstatically over sand, each frame incredible to stare at. And it has a plot, of sorts: one gang of vehicles chases our heroes, Furiosa and Tom Hardy’s Max in first one direction and then another direction. But no origin stories, unless you count Max’s first couple of lines about the end of the world and the death of his loved ones, no elaborate fan service, no complicated mythologies to keep track of. Just a bunch of beautifully designed cars against a beautifully designed backdrop and a bunch of beautifully designed bad guys doing beautifully designed bad things to each other. It’s not complicated; you just sit in the theater and stare and listen to the engines rev.

Director George Miller was a 34-year-old emergency room doctor in Sydney, Australia when he made 1979’s original _Mad Max, _inspired by the bloody tableaux he saw daily at his hospital; cars wreaked a havoc he understood, having seen it up close. To make things even bleaker and more believable, he set the film in the future, around an oil crisis not unlike the one Australia had just suffered through. He cast an unknown Mel Gibson and made the movie with his doctor money and found that audiences responded to the mute savagery of the thing. So he made two increasingly loud and spectacular sequels, watched Gibson become whatever he became, and grew up into one of those avuncular Hollywood presences, turning his gifts for radical simplicity toward actual radically simple children’s movies: Babe: Pig in the City, Happy Feet, Happy Feet Two.

Miller is now 70 years old and 30 years removed from the last Mad Max movie. And yet somehow, Mad Max: Fury Road is the most progressive, smart, and radical blockbuster to come out in what feels like forever. How?! Well, for one thing, it’s not really about Max at all—though let us pause here to appreciate Tom Hardy once more, stoic, menacing, with a face whose mere expressions can carry a movie (and did, in Locke) and a manic, dangerous energy that is perfect for the screen (and off it too; fucking alley, right?), no matter what screen he may be on. But this is Charlize’s movie, both plot-wise—it is Furiosa’s flight from the lair of future-warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), with his stolen slave harem/model gang (Zoe Kravitz, Riley Keough, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Abbey Lee, and Courtney Eaton) in the back of her war rig, that gives the movie its forward motion—and charisma-wise, as Theron turns her character’s grim and implacable resolution into an awe-inspiring, galvanizing, MRA-angering force. By about halfway through, even the pregnant women riding in the back of the truck are dealing death; Max is just along for the ride, mostly. Us too.

Like the original _Mad Max_es, Fury Road is violent, brutal, wryly funny, and maybe more prescient than we’d like—a world bereft of water and dominated by warlords seems more likely by the day, especially if you are where Hollywood is, in drought-stricken Los Angeles. It’s not a vision of tomorrow that’s all that appetizing, as a possible destination for mankind. But Miller also gives us the rare film that depicts killer ladies doing killer things in a killer-looking place. We’ll take that future any day.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014). GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.